Apple Music has featured lossless streams and spatial audio since June 7. Unlike the competition, you pay nothing extra.
Apple announced lossless streaming and spatial audio a while back, now the features are active. The nice thing is that the IT giant does not charge anything extra for these extras. However, both features are (for now?) only available to subscribers of Apple Music. So you can’t buy lossless tracks in the iTunes Store for local storage and unlimited personal use. In that store, you’re still stuck with the 256 kpbs AAC files. To which, by the way, there’s also not a whole lot to complain about in terms of sound quality, but it would be nice if eventually the lossless variants showed up here too.
Dolby Atmos
By the way, the spatial audio tracks in Apple Music are based on Dolby Atmos and are meant to experience 3D audio through headphones. The trick works with any headphones, so that saves in the first place. As written above, the question now is what the other streamers will do in terms of cost.
Besides Apple, there is also Amazon that offers lossless streaming just within the standard subscription. Which justifies the question of why you would want to pay more for the same quality with, say, Tidal or soon Spotify. Chances are that if prices remain higher there, at least some of their subscribers will switch. Why be a thief of your own wallet?